Linda Darragh, head of innovation, Kellogg School of Management

Working to push Northwestern back to top of world's elite business schools

March 04, 2013|By Janet Kidd Stewart, Special to the Tribune

Linda Darragh, executive director of the Kellogg School of Management Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative, is deeply rooted in the startup community as it finally enjoys some successes. (Zbigniew Bzdak, Chicago Tribune)

From the back of a lecture hall in Evanston, the innovation chief at the Kellogg School of Management fires questions at a student team presenting a business plan for healthy meals delivered to Chinese workplaces.

For Linda Darragh, executive director of Kellogg's Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative, this could be any real-world pitch session with venture capitalists or a startup accelerator. She has been trying to boost the city's startup climate since before Groupon Inc. founder Andrew Mason was born.

"This is great. This partner in China, though, what's the deal with them?" Darragh calls to the team. "Could they run away with this now? I want you to think about the downside risk. What if someone gets sick (during test marketing)? It could be a liability problem.

"There are a lot of positives here, but always think about what could go wrong."

It's a classic business lesson Darragh takes to heart as she works through her first academic year since Kellogg Dean Sally Blount poached her from crosstown rival University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Blount's marching orders are clear: Get Northwestern University back to the top of the world's elite business schools, even as the number of traditional two-year students shrinks and the entire industry grapples with massive amounts of learning resources offered online for free.

When it comes to entrepreneurship, it means inserting Kellogg more squarely into Chicago's long-awaited startup wave.

That's where Darragh comes in. She's deeply rooted in the startup community as it finally enjoys some successes and has backing from Blount to weave her ideas for innovation across Kellogg and to other schools within the university.

And she's on good terms with her former boss at Booth, she said, adding that she's scheduled to golf this month in Arizona with Ellen Rudnick, executive director of Booth's Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

All of that should make her piece of Blount's strategic plan to reinvigorate the school and boost its relationships a little easier, but it also raises expectations among students and alumni. Managing those expectations will be a challenge, Darragh conceded.

"I've already got a full inbox of messages from alumni, and some of the new classes are so popular, there weren't enough seats for everyone who wanted to take them," she said. "As you continue to raise opportunities, people are always expecting more."

Organizational realignment

In her office, she pulls out copies of Blount's reorganization plans, which Darragh said are also hauled out at just about every staff meeting.

Blount, an alum, was named dean in 2010 and has overseen a rebranding initiative, a scaling back of the two-year MBA to focus on the one-year program, plans for a $200 million campus expansion and several new hires.

Under Blount's plan, called Envision Kellogg, major curriculum changes will cut across the traditional silos of graduate business education — accounting, finance, management strategy, marketing and the like.

There are now four themes: entrepreneurship and innovation; collaboration, or teamwork; customer management; and the increasing demand for business to address public policy issues.

It's Darragh's job to tackle the first of those efforts, picking up on strides she made at Booth in an entrepreneurship role. During her tenure, the Hyde Park neighborhood school consistently pumped out more startups than its North Shore rival.

"We had a headhunting firm look across the country, but it was clear that one of the best people lived here in Evanston and I simply offered to shorten her commute," Blount quipped. "She's already met all of her first-year benchmarks."

Darragh was an adjunct and then an assistant professor at Kellogg from 1999 to 2005, until she clashed with Steven Rogers, who was director of the school's Larry and Carol Levy Institute for Entrepreneurial Practice under former Kellogg Dean Dipak Jain.

She left the school in what she calls a mutual decision. Rogers, now at Harvard University, did not respond to messages seeking comment.

"We had two very different philosophies, and it just wasn't going anywhere," Darragh said. "Ultimately, you take a tough situation and learn that it's not the end of the world."

It proved to be the most difficult time in her career, said her husband, Alex, who leads CBRE Group Inc.'s global corporate real estate services business in Canada, Latin America and the Caribbean.

The couple met as undergraduates at Queen's University in Canada and came to Chicago so he could pursue a graduate urban planning degree at Northwestern. They married in 1978.

"Her first tenure obviously didn't end very nicely," Alex said. Without an MBA herself, Darragh found herself a nonacademic in a very academic institution and began to question whether she could stay in academics at all, he recalled.